UGC rules blamed for helping promote fake journals in India

India’s University Grants Commission (UGC), responsible for
maintaining standards of higher education, has been blamed for
the mushrooming of "predatory journals" in the country1.

The allegation comes from the Indian National Science
Academy (INSA), the country's premier scientific society, in the form of a
scathing editorial in its journal "Proceedings of INSA."

Predatory journals are fake open access journals which often
claim high ‘impact factor’ but publish — for a substantial fee sub-standard non
peer-reviewed manuscripts polluting scientific literature with trash. Forty two
per cent of world's fake journal publishers are based in India2.

The editorial by Subash Lakhotia, the journal's chief editor
and a zoology professor at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, says that one
reason for the growth of fake publications in India is the Academic Performance
Indicator (API) system introduced by the UGC. Under this system, a certain
number of papers must have been published by a research scholar prior to
submission of the doctoral thesis, and by the teachers in colleges and
universities at the time of their recruitment and assessment for promotion.

To meet this UGC stipulation, research scholars and teachers
have been publishing their work in mediocre journals, says Lakhotia. The major
catalyst for the cancerous growth of predatory journals is "the demand
created by increasing emphasis on the number of research publications as an
important determinant of the academic performance of a faculty/scientist being
considered for appointment or promotion."

According to the editorial, vested interests in the
predatory journal industry have spread their tentacles in each university –
many of them are actually being managed by faculty members themselves.

Lakhotia says that the UGC mandate for prospective and
existing faculty members to ‘produce’ research papers was a misconceived idea
as it ignored the fact that majority of colleges and universities in the
country lack even the minimal infrastructure required for any kind of research.

The “gross mismatch” between the existing infrastructure and
what is demanded of the applicants, proves to be an extremely fertile ground
for the mushrooming of predatory journals, especially when all that mattered
was the number of papers published by an individual with little consideration
for quality, the editorial says.

One would not question the good intentions of the UGC while introducing
these measures for maintaining minimal academic quality, it says.
"However, in the absence of a minimally required infrastructure these
measures have actually inflicted more damage than improving the quality of
faculty or of the education being imparted. What the country needs is a very
serious overhaul of the university and college system and its management."

Gopalakrishnan Seethapathy, a researcher in pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of Oslo who had recently conducted a survey3 of predatory publications from India, agrees. "Most guidelines (of UGC) are tailor-made in such away that the number of publications is the major criterion for appointments and tenure promotions, and not their quality," he told Nature India in an email.

"As a consequence, publication has become the mantra and motto for academics, resulting in the rise of predatory publishing." Seethapathy says his survey found poor quality journals which are in fact owned by faculties and institutes and adds that UGC should consider alternative eligibility criteria for PhD candidates to defend their thesis instead of forcing them "to just publish something." There is also an urgent need to develop a mechanism both by institutes (and funding agencies) to identify the quality of articles published by their researchers.